Charlene Barnes
ASMP Advocate
My son Jimmy was a popular, athletic, and funny 20-year-old when we suddenly lost him to serogroup B meningococcal disease in 2015. One morning, he woke up in severe pain, and we rushed him to the emergency room by ambulance. At the hospital, he had a fever of 103°F, back pain, a stiff neck, and numbness in his arms and legs. He was diagnosed with the flu and sent home.
The next morning, Jimmy developed a rash all over his body. I begged him to let me take him back to the hospital, but he insisted on staying in bed to recover. That was the last time we spoke. He passed away within 28 hours of falling ill.
At the time, meningococcal vaccines didn’t protect against serogroup B, the strain Jimmy had. The serogroup B vaccine had only recently become available in 2014, and it wasn’t widely known. I remember thinking, Why didn’t we know about the vaccine? What did the emergency room miss?
Losing Jimmy shattered my world. Grieving and desperate for answers, I made the decision to go back to school to become a nurse at the age of 68. I needed to understand why this happened and how it could have been mistaken for the flu when it was something far more dangerous. That’s when I enrolled in the accelerated nursing program at the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus.
During the pandemic, I spent 16 intense months in that program, studying for hours every day and completing clinical rotations at hospitals across the Tampa Bay area. In May, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, becoming USF’s oldest spring graduate.
During my clinicals, I realized that being older gave me something valuable—empathy. I could relate to the patients and truly understand how frightening it must be to be in their shoes.
My journey into nursing was driven by my love for my children and a deep desire to protect others. Today, I work to raise awareness about meningococcal B and the importance of vaccination. If sharing Jimmy’s story can help even one family avoid the heartbreak we’ve endured, then his life—and his loss—will have made a difference.